SMU Verdict Haunts NCAA In New Concussion Fight

SMU Mustangs football is back in the middle of the national concussion conversation, even as the newest legal punch aimed at the NCAA comes from a Navy legend.

Former Navy safety Chet Moeller has filed a lawsuit against the NCAA in Alabama, accusing the organization of fraud and negligence tied to head trauma from his college football career and a 2024 diagnosis of possible neurodegenerative brain disease.

MORE: SMU’s Bryson DeChambeau Faces Major Reckoning

Moeller played in the 1970s, became a unanimous All-American in 1975, later entered the College Football Hall of Fame in 2010 and remains one of the most decorated players in Navy history.

But the SMU angle is impossible to miss.

Just weeks ago, the estate of former SMU football player J.T. Davis was awarded a massive $140 million verdict against the NCAA in Texas.

Davis died from Alzheimer’s disease and was later diagnosed with CTE. That verdict didn’t just make headlines. It sent a warning flare across college football, and Moeller’s case now lands in that same storm.

Moeller’s lawsuit claims his injuries include “mood swings, anger, cognitive trouble and confusion.”

It also accuses the NCAA of “fail[ing] to create and enforce a safe playing environment and never publicly or privately inform[ing] Chet Moeller or any other college football player of the risks from brain trauma, including latent brain disease, that Chet Moeller and others faced.”

That’s the core of the fight. This isn’t about one hit, one game or one bad afternoon.

It’s about whether college football’s governing body knew enough, soon enough, to warn athletes before they absorbed years of punishment.

The complaint alleges Moeller endured “possibly hundreds of unidentified, unacknowledged and unknown mild concussions and head impacts during his college football career that significantly increased his risk of developing latent neurodegenerative disease.”

Then comes the legal hammer, “The foreseeable consequence of the NCAA's misconduct, which was known by the NCAA, was that Chet Moeller and/or other former NCAA football players would develop, at some time in the future, brain disease caused by repetitive head trauma and that the brain disease would manifest in a wide variety of symptoms, including those suffered by Chet Moeller.”

The NCAA hasn’t filed a court response in Moeller’s case yet. After the Davis verdict, the organization argued, “The evidence that was presented was largely based on the knowledge and science as it exists today, rather than what was known by the parties in the 1950s when Mr. Davis played college football.”

MORE: SMU Football Stars Crash DCTF All-Texas List

That defense may be tested again.

For SMU fans, the Davis case already made this issue painfully real. Now Moeller’s lawsuit suggests the NCAA’s concussion problem isn’t going away quietly.

It’s getting louder.

Join Our Roundtable Community For Free!

Share your takes, connect with our Roundtable writers, and talk sports with fellow fans. Download the free Roundtable App today and stay closer to the conversation.